1950s teevee quality control. My favorite part is the little cork knockers that bat the vacuum tubes during testing to make sure they’ll work right even if you bat them with little cork knockers. (That’s at just before six minutes in.) (And right after that, Queen Elizabeth herself heats a vacuum tube in a perforated coffee can to torture it into compliance.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQS58t39_U

Sleeping elephant seal. It does that whole-face cheek-wobbling comical vaudeville snore-blatt that Mervin Gilbert brought down the house with as the Cowardly Lion in Gloriana Opera Company’s production of /The Wizard of Oz/. The effect is amplified by its nose being a big balloon filled with jello. Mervin did it with /acting/.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E26zhrvNHyM

Another stupid game. I think they might all be stupid games. This is a lot like the exhausted-bloody-pathetic old-married-couple prizefight between Apollo and Starbuck in BSG, but over and over, forever. Imagine living like that.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcLvhN9tDmk

“If the short con is an anecdote, the long con is a novel. Essentially, a short con involves taking the pigeon for all the money he has on his person, while the long con sends him home to get more.” -Luc Sante

And here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

The latest SpaceX rocket launch (Falcon 9) seen from a distance, sped up to suit the modern attention span, because a /rocket/ isn’t fast enough anymore to suit us. Pretty, though. Also exciting for the chemtrails loons; this is the chemtrail from Hell for them.https://vimeo.com/248591160

A paean to Doctor Bose (20 minutes well spent). Near the end, the MIT finance woman mists up a little bit, mainly, I think, because of the yummy $150 million bequest, though maybe she liked the guy some and was genuinely sorry he’s dead and misses him. It can be both.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6O3F8Po2UA

“Prior to testing, ants were anesthetized in a 30-degree-Fahrenheit chamber until immobile. Samples were fixed at the mouth to a [centrifuge] disk using glue and accelerant with the head pointing towards the center of the disk.” “Micrographs of ruptured specimens revealed that failure occurs at the neck–head transition.” Get that, men? Failure occurs at the neck-head transition. Now get out there and don’t let that happen to you. Well, what are you all waiting for? Go! Go! Go!http://www.neatorama.com/2017/12/26/Centrifugal-Research-Review/

Everyone in this waffle restaurant just suddenly went crazy and attacked everyone else, kicking and punching and scratching and grabbing and screaming. You can see in the video how it gradually settles down as they all become exhausted. Nobody knows what started it. Some kind of gas, maybe. Something in the batter. /The Screwfly Solution/ by James Tiptree Jr., perhaps, or it could have been one of those alien monsters who hover up in a corner of the warp engine room and feed on rage brainwaves. But… /wait/ a minute. Why didn’t it affect the person (or creature) running the camera?http://nbc4i.com/2017/12/28/cell-phone-video-shows-massive-brawl-inside-ohio-waffle-house

Speaking of which, in everything like this –the hippo one, the water buffalo one, the sheep and the ducks and the goats ones, the emu one, the baby elephant one– the driver never just stops to let the animals stop freaking out. He always just keeps going and will often even speed up to threaten them more. Wouldn’t you stop the [motorbike, car, jeep, tractor, vehicle]?https://laughingsquid.com/antelope-run-across-a-montana-highway/

The show ran 6.8 hours but this recording, beginning to end, is only 6.5 hours long. Eighteen missing minutes somewhere in there. Evidence of alien abduction? A flaw in the fabric of space and time? A loyal becurlered secretary’s obstruction of justice? No, no and no.

You know how I’m always saying how wrong it is for the so-called manager of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corp. (KZYX) to pay the local airpeople nothing at all for working at what every radio station is there for in the first place, and at the same time pay himself $60,000 a year for merely being the corporation’s hood ornament? And how I keep pointing out that there’s a program director to direct the programs, and an operations manager to manage the operations, and a bookkeeper to keep the books, and a business underwriting coordinator to coordinate the business underwriting, and a barefoot doofus to answer the phone in the office, and so on, and automation runs without anyone needed to watch it blink, and airpeople do their prep work and show up and do their shows, and a transmitter is more reliable than a refrigerator and requires even less attention nor maintenance, and the only thing all that leaves the pathetic fraud of a manager to do to “keep KZYX on the air”, as they say, is to somehow, I don’t know how, that’s up to him, but /somehow/ arrange barriers in his life so he never sleepwalks into the transmitter shack and kicks the plug out.

Well, at an hour-and-thirteen into last night’s Memo of the Air show (at KNYO) I stretched my long ballet-dancer’s legs out under the table and bumped the heavy end-box of the microphone snake, which silently tipped over onto a power strip switch, switching it off, which stopped my audio stream going out from what’s also the recording computer /and/ stopped my backup recorder (a video camera), and I only noticed because the laptop I play music from, also plugged into that same power strip, screen-blanks on a very short schedule to save power when on battery; it kept blanking, off to the right of the reading easel, and while I read whatever I was reading to no-one I kept autonomically flicking the trackball to light the computer screen again. Then, of course, problem noticed, problem solved, and three good things about all this: That thatch of wiring will be simplified, safe-ified and moved. The streaming/recording computer, which requires its own screen-blank-setting and other setup attention when reset, will be fixed so it doesn’t and put on a backup power unit. And this was a good real-life test of the system Sid Cooperider and Govinda recently upgraded at KMEC, which faithfully continued with Memo of the Air instantly it re-became available.

So I’m not gonna stop saying that true thing and other true things that need to be known about KZYX, which breaks down as often as KNYO does but costs /$600,000 a year/ more to do it (fifty fucking times more, and much of that taxpayers’ money, and still not paying the airpeople for their work), but I’ll be smiling with not only both sides of my mouth now but with the original side that was always going up and down a little continuing to do that when I say it because the story has a new facet to what makes it if not darkly then dimly funny. There, see how it always makes a joke better when you explain it, especially when you do it in a self-deprecating, wry manner?

Last night was a pretty good show, by the way. Lots of valuable information, local writing, callers from distant lands, irony, pathos, polyphony, epiphony, synecdoche , hubris, polyphony. That’s two polyphonies, that’s enough. And you’ll find I cleverly spliced the recording so you don’t even notice the Nixonian/Saganian missing eighteen minutes. See what I do for you?

Speaking of which, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

For when you actually want to smell and taste like an ashtray. (Remember ashtrays? They used to be everywhere. Every public building, every waiting room. Next to the door in the grocery store. In dashboard /and/ door armrests of cars. And remember how they had those mechanical chrome ones on a stand, that were exactly as tall as you were, with a button on top that you’d push down and the inside would spin, right next to your eye?) (That’s what I don’t understand about these fidget spinner toys. Why don’t they spin when you squeeze them? There’s your million dollar idea. Children like to push on things and squeeze things.) (Though the videos of using a jet of compressed air to make them go 22,000 rpm and explode are interesting.) Right, smell like a sexy ashtray, sorry, here’s what to buy:http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/cigarette_perfume

And because of all the sandwiches there. This is an example of human labor of crushing boredom holding its own in comparison with robots doing everything so people are free to transcend the mundane and learn to play a musical instrument or ride a skateboard or whatever you choose to do. Or abuse opioids. They’re saying that’s all the robots’ fault, but I don’t think it is. And a merry Xmas to you, son. Get a job. I hear there are jobs in sandwiches.https://boingboing.net/2017/12/19/worlds-most-depressing-semi.html

“Yes, thank you, Kozue, if you say Hannukah over and over a bunch of times it sounds like a washing machine. But it’s like that with a lot of words. With every word. You’ll find that out, and drum it to death, and get tired of that too, and the next thing, and the thing after that. And then eventually you’ll be old and your own little grandchild will kick your foot and startle you awake and tell you about Hannukah and washing machines, and you’ll nod and smile and tell her to go in the kitchen and show her mother, and that’s how it works. Go on.”

Or, thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost, you can get it *this other way, which you might like better because it offers an instant-play option and isn’t surrounded by confusing flashing ads. Though if the thought of a clean internet experience, free of intrusive ads, appeals to you I recommend free uBlock Origin. For Chrome.For Firefox. Or for Safari and Opera and so on. It just installs and works. And later on if there’s something you want to look at that’s being blocked, you can click it off and look. I used to use Bluhell Firewall in Firefox, but they aren’t compatible with each other anymore, and uBlock Origin works just as well if not better. Just don’t confuse it for uBlock, because uBlock Origin and uBlock are two different programs from two different companies of people. Like Greek Orthodox Christianity and the Roman kind and the Baptists (say BAB-tuss), like Kleenex and Pyrex, Korla Pandit and Pandit Ray, lightning and the lightning bug, they might be related, and they might even be interchangeable, but they’re not the same.

Anyway, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile enough items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Rudolpho doesn’t owe you /squat/, you tyrannical prick. (Not you, reader. You’re not a tyrannical prick. It’s Santa.) (Or maybe you are. I don’t care. It takes all kinds.) (I just always identified with Rudolf because of my great honking hammer of a schnoz.) (And this just reminded me– I used to do a trick for the Whale School kids where I put two penlights up my nose and breathed in and out to make it pump and flash. Try that.)http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/rudolphs-response.html

This guy made a flying model Enterprise-D out of foam-core craft material (with running lights, and lighted deflector dish). He’s finished working and finally throws it into the air at three minutes in. It doesn’t fly very well, but it flies at all, and that’s impressive. And there are other things next to it in the queue that look promising: a flying Star Destroyer as big as a car, a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, and more.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFzu5ALdS7Q

I think this is an advertisement for some kind of old-person drug that obviously works. (You might have to click on the image to make it start playing. And if it’s already playing, you might have to click on it to turn the sound on. It depends.)https://twitter.com/yashar/status/937859856970797057

Some things got gaziggled about my setup at Juanita’s, so I asked for permission to play an hour of music on KNYO by remote, to make sure everything will work tomorrow night for Memo of the Air, also by remote, not from Franklin Street in Fort Bragg. (Hint: it’s working like a champ. The noise you hear in the background during the intro is the hose-type hair dryer under the blankets to heat up the bed.)

There’s some odd material here. William Shatner’s shatneriffic cover of /Garbage Man/. /Carry On, My Wayward Son/ on two cellos, viola and bluegrass fiddle. Johnny Winter at Woodstock. Julie London, /Somebody Loves Me/. A heavy metal version of Toto’s /Africa/. Cliff Edwards (Ukulele Ike), /My Dog’s In Love With Your Dog/. By the end, /Ga-den Badoo/, /Woyahoo/, /I’m Afraid of You/, then /Inka Dinka Doo/. You know all the words to all these songs. Don’t be ashamed to sing out loud. You have the music in you.

Right now, as I write, I’m in the middle of putting together tomorrow night’s show. Just in case you didn’t know, KMEC has expanded the time they give to my show, so now when I start at 9pm on KNYO, KMEC is right there on it too, and stays on it until… that’s still being worked out. Maybe they’ll drop off at 3am, maybe they’ll stay on till four, or even later. I don’t care; it’s a week after the first show starting on both stations at the same time, and I’m still fricking thrilled at this improvement. This is at least 3/4 of the radios I used to be able to reach on KMFB, and all those radios are older now, wiser, less likely to fly off the handle and pull some cruddy stunt that could cost you the election.

“So there I stood in line at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the aroma of tuna hotdish permeating the church basement, waiting for Mrs. Magendanz to finish carefully carving pieces of warm apple pie and place each one gently on a paper plate, and I found myself staring at the back of Myrtle Krebsbach’s dress, her long dark hair falling gracefully on her shoulders. I thought back to that time, a few years ago, when we found ourselves together sharing a cigarette behind the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian while we waited for the city council meeting to begin, and as the soft light of autumn sunset disappeared behind the horizon and the whippoorwills began their crepuscular trills, I reached out and firmly took hold of her bosom in my hands and said, HONK! …And then I said to Mrs. Krebsbach, “If you ever tell anyone about this, I will kill you and throw your body in the lake, and you will never work in radio again.”

And thanks to the fine folks at KMEC-LP Ukiah /this/ particular show ran live there too, from the beginning at 9pm, not waiting till midnight to be included as had been the way. They had a meeting at KMEC, all unbeknownst to me, and apparently some people spoke up on my behalf, and they had to change things anyway because of upgrading and the aftermath of the fire and connections chaos and all, and they just changed it, just like that, and told me. So, progress. Thank you, Joel Thompson, Ed Nieves, Sid Cooperider, Alicia Bales, /the/ Govinda, and others at KMEC for this improvement and opportunity.

It seems to have worked okay. KMEC left about 20 minutes before I signed off KNYO at about 4:05 a.m. but the very end of the show I’ll always be running an old-time radio play while I clean up my mess and make the studio presentable for the next person, so if losing KMEC at that point is the most likely thing to go wrong electrically and it happens again once in awhile in future shows, and nothing else goes wrong, who could ask for anything more?

This show is a little more uneven than usual, due to I don’t know what, nervousness, probably, but that’s the good thing about your getting the recording. You can skip right past anything that doesn’t interest you personally, or that you’re embarrassed for me about, or that grates on your nerves, and find something that does interest you. It won’t hurt my feelings, and it’s so kind of you to even worry about that. You’re a good person to care about others that much, in general, or to care about me in particular at all, after what I said to /you/, whatever that was. See, I don’t even remember. You’re that much better than /I/ am, and good for you. Good for you.

Otherwise, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile enough items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Cynthia Frank of QED Press and Cypress House Press came in and read from her own and John Fremont’s work. Ellie Cooney called and read her /Teenage Wasteland/ story. Scott Peterson, Alex Bosworth, Ezekiel Krahlin all called. Even so, I read almost all of what I brought to read, and played another episode of Candy Matson, Girl Detective, so I didn’t get out of there until 5am, and then there’s the drive home, and the computer housekeeping I have to do when I get there. So that’s why this update is later than usual. Just to let you know. It’s a pretty good show. A fountain of information. Like those firehose fountains in front of a casino, but for your brain.

And on top of all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

All of this weird Cthulhunian macaroni is a single mosquito’s foot. And there are literally 100 quadrillion mosquitoes in the world, each with six of these.https://imgur.com/pO4ta8o

And the feet aren’t the part than injects you with diseases. That would be /this/ part, digging around in your flesh in search of a blood vessel to tap, like the so-called manager and office people of KZYX, for example, who suck $300,000 (!) out of the radio station for themselves every year and don’t pay the airpeople who do the actual work of radio, preparing and doing their shows all year long, all together, even a single red penny. But they /so/ appreciate their dedication.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXSPacvuak#at=20

“In their last meeting, the day before his death on April 29, 1875, she visits the count who is a bedridden invalid, effectively rubbishing the story of his lusty demise on the Champs-Élysées.” -Rhys Griffiths

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

A story about cars. A ride in (a replica of) the first (internal combustion engine) car. I like how when you’re going about ten miles an hour in this thing it clearly feels like a fast wild ride, so when the lady engineer slightly turns the tiller the announcer guy cries out, /Aaaah!/https://laughingsquid.com/worlds-first-car/

Another nice thing about Canada: while you wait fifteen minutes to see the doctor for free, just out of the blue, on your lunch hour (that’s a whole paid hour) you can wander around in a city park that looks like this. (Instead of, in the U.S., paying thousands of dollars to a medical insurance company to wait three months for a dermatologist appointment, /sleeping/ in a park that’s a patch of dead grass on a median divider with a plaque dedicating it to the piss-water beer company that paid for the curb around it.)https://imgur.com/FBZbYFR

And Jenn asked for pictures of weird stuff in people’s parents’ house. Just keep slowly scrolling down. Thousands more will load ahead of you. (My favorite is the wall-mounted dead ceramic goose head-and-neck spilling out of, and being the thumb handle for, a coffee chalice made of the rest of the dead ceramic goose… Unfortunately I’ve lost it now and can’t find it again, or I’d give you a link straight to that. Tch.)https://twitter.com/jenndangerous/status/933752246088749062

Acting teacher, pianist and playwright Dan Kozloff came by at the beginning of the show to get the video of his and his students’ new play that I shot on Wednesday, and he was persuaded to stick around to talk for a few minutes. And I had contact last week with Charles Cornelius Tyler, lead singer of the old Community School band /DADA/ (early 1980s). Um, here’s his SoundClick page, so there’s some rather newer Charles Tyler music in the show for a break or two. It’s a seven-hour show; many things happen in it, and almost all of them surprising, educational and wonderfully good for you. Wow.

This show ran on KNYO fine, but a little before 1am Jerry told me that KMEC was still playing reggae music. It turned out to be a simple technical glitch. Sid Cooperider emailed me today and explained what went wrong. So that’s solved. Next week, at midnight Friday night, the annual Memo of the Air: Thorgellen show will be picked up in progress as usual, as will the show the week after that, and so on. Thanks be to Sid. May Sid be with you. /And also with you./

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Can you hear the difference in sound between a $300 flute and a $20,000 flute? Because /I/ can’t, and neither can the concert flautist tested in the video. So, so far, apparently flutes and electric guitars and bass guitars are just like wine, where all you have to do is change the color a little bit or fake a label, and no-one ze wiser.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHMFdks4CGg

I’m tired of the fad of people saying /Oh, HELL, no/ (or the way they write it now, here in the stupid future: oh hell no, or OH HELL NO, or even O HEL NO (which is technically historically correct). But it’s the perfect title for this because these guys are fucking idiots.http://bitsandpieces.us/2017/11/riding-the-ridge/

An unpacking of just crates and crates of interesting material, including a letter and a call from death-defying daredevil Alex Bosworth. The genesis of Elly Cooney’s outlook on life and otherwise. Three chapters from John Passyka’s autobio. Major Mark Scaramella on the subject of a disgruntled subscriber. Rex Gressett, Cindy Richards, Scott Peterson. Flynn Washburne chased through a pear orchard by zombies! Mickey Chalfin, John Redding… Look at this, there’s so much here. And also another in the series of Jerry Philbrick’s entertaining because goofily wrongheaded angry rants. It takes all kinds, it really does.

Zeke’s story confused me as to how to read it, depending on links to other things and images that didn’t come with the text I had, so I did the best I could but soon gave up. I’m sorry. Next week’s show he’ll call at 1am and read it himself and no doubt it will all make perfect sense.

At about 3am, near the end of the show, before /Murder! At! Midnight!/, is a collection of nightmares donated by readers to AtlasObscura, including, “The corpse of Ethel Mertz rose up out of the dirt and came after me. GAH!”

(From the tangled nest of Wikipedia articles about /I Love Lucy/: “Ethel Mae Mertz is the middle-aged landlady of Lucy Ricardo. Ethel was born in 1905 and was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico (episode #113). She is married to Fred, with whom she had a career in vaudeville. Ethel and Lucy are close friends, habitually scheming together; Ethel is generally the voice of reason as a counterpart to Lucy’s hare-brained ideas.”) Did you know Fred and Ethel had a career in vaudeville? I didn’t know that. Also the actors who played them, Will Frawley and Vivian Vance, could not stand each other. Vivian Vance was in every way a professional. She’d show up ready to work, with her lines down cold. Will Frawley would be smoking and drinking and listening to ball games with his feet up in the dressing room when not wandering around messing everybody up and being a dick about everything. The on-screen bickering and attitude between them was realistic because real. The comical micro-expressions of revulsion that can’t be faked or paid for.

Furthermore, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Handbell choirs are kinetic and wild and this video points that out better than the usual static video shot from next to the exit in the back. It grabs you up. If it inspires you, there’s a handbell choir right in Fort Bragg, that you can join.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zOGjgVygSg

It reminds me an old science fiction short story about people living on a tilting platform, whose name and writer escape me, though I think it was called /On the Platform/, and of a somewhat less old book by Stephen Baxter: /Raft/. And of this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CTesYaduBA

These things can run literally billions of billions of billions of cubic miles. They’re bigger than all our problems but considerably less dense and so very far away from our petty squabbles and racisms and peevish atomic bombs and simply pretty, not to mention their being nurseries of eventual planets and moons and life of their own. Our immortal machine descendants will go there one day, and also everywhere else, if we can just get our shit together in the next crucial little while.https://boingboing.net/2017/11/05/relaxing-video-on-awe-inspirin.html

Trayvon Martin’s mother has a few words for you. And a petition to sign to stop two cynical companies from profiting from encouraging murder. The petition is to the companies, though, to please stop doing something profitable just because they can get away with it, so good luck with that. /I/ signed it.https://stopmurderinsurance.org/

Do any of these situations fit you, and if so, which ones, and in what (decreasing) order? For me it’s number 8, then /maybe/ 3, and then 4. But 8, for sure, and not just at night in bed but every waking ten minutes and often in dreams, all the time. I don’t think that’s necessarily being an introvert; I think it’s just a consequence of having a memory and not being torpid. You’re active in the world, you say things, you do things; some of them are mortifying at the time and even more so in retrospect; the older you get the bigger the ledger grows, and then it’s /ow, ow, ow, stop thinking that/.https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/introvert-comics_us_59fb8559e4b01b47404947d7

I’ve always been both afraid of and admiring of street performers because of how brash and confident they are. My favorite here is the squeaking Charlie Chaplin-like person at the end.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6SC37kMlkI

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” -Epicurus, 33 A.D.

Furthermore, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

“A generative adversarial network combines two neural networks engaged in a zero-sum competition. The result is a form of unsupervised machine learning that can produce imaginary celebrities like the ones shown in this one-hour video.” (This is what I read you the long tech article about.)https://boingboing.net/2017/10/31/hypnotic-video-of-imaginary-ce.html

Those are high-voltage neon discharge display tubes from old Russian nuclear power plant controls. I declare this the coolest wristwatch ever, even though you have to take it off and charge it up every seven minutes of actual use.https://theawesomer.com/nixie-horizonte-watch/451965/

Here’s the guy in 1909. I saw him last week in Cloverdale; he has a pushwagon and a lop-eared dog with a bandanna for a collar. It’s the same guy, though. Think of the things he must have seen in his long life, in this world and the spirit world.https://imgur.com/Wb1ofm5

“Joan fails to comprehend the nature of her personal entrapment. Her attempts to seek out false alternatives that harm her potential for true independence lead to escalating patterns of supernatural chaos and violence. The original nightmares emerged from her uneasy relationship with her boorish husband. But they also take on a sinister form of development as a result of her flirtation with a world of witchcraft which is as stifling and conformist as the deadly world she seeks escape from.” -The Sun

A seven-hour show. A pretty good one, even though I somehow misplaced half an hour of material, including a story by Eleanor Cooney. There’s always next week. The novel /El Sereno/ by Jay Frankston reached the end this show with Chapter 38. John Passyka sent a story of the giant pet owl he raised from a tiny baby. Scott Peterson, in part three of a series, expunged his demons regarding Project Sanctuary and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Zeke Krahlin told a story about a friendly lonely werewolf and his friendly lonely friend. Lanny Cotler called and talked about his service in Vietnam, books he wrote, movies he made, the /radio station in Willits he begat/ (KLLG). Peter Lit’s diplomatic take on Jerry Philbrick’s angry racist right-wing rants. Some letters about Measure B, pro and/or con. History, science, creepy snark, recipes for both disaster and what H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzies would call /wunnafuru foog/. It’s a lot to digest.

Furthermore, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

A time-travel movie that I’d recommend to anyone, that the latest partial reveal of JFK assassination files reminded me of so I looked it up again. A little boy saw Jackie Kennedy in tears on teevee, imprinted on her, became obsessed with her and her sorrow. He grew up and got old and invented time travel to undo the murder and those tears, and to dance with her in a hotel room, he in his space suit, she in her little pillbox hat and delicate heels. It’s very well thought through. It’s a fine, satisfying film.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequest_(film)

A disturbing trick. I know that when it’s said, “Well played, sir,” most of the time what that means is, in episodic endless competition, “Grrr, you win /this/ time, ya bastard,” but sometimes it just means, Well played, sir. It’s admiration for a trick well played.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv-Y17HCK0k

Do da-doh. Doo-da doh da-doh. That’s what they sound like, the idiot humans who locked me in this tiny pool alone when I can swim seventy miles an hour, so I go back and forth, back and forth all day. /Fuck!/ Do da doh da ho da do, human, one day you’ll get yours, you’ll see.https://boingboing.net/2017/10/24/beluga-whale-imitating-human-s.html

Same thing, basically, but at least these people knew what they signed up for. (Haunted house flash photos.) This might be a good tool for sorting people into appropriate occupations. For example, the ones whose natural reaction to startling danger is to move /toward/ it, to protect the others– those might become good policewomen or soldiers. The ones who cringe, clutch cowardly at anyone nearby and throw them between themselves and danger– those might make, oh, I dunno, generals and presidents and really anyone at any level of the chain of command in a corporation.https://www.flickr.com/photos/nightmaresfearfactory/with/36321772060/

“BeamNG.drive is a driving simulator that’s acquired a cult following due to its uncannily realistic modeling of soft-body physics. YouTube is full of crash videos created with it: the thanato-erotic Ballardian lure of mangled automobiles, but with mercilessly bad electronic dance music.”

An unusually large number of locally written stories in this show. Alex Bosworth returned from the dead again. There’s Mitch Clogg, Jay Frankston, Todd Walton, Scott Peterson, Ezekiel Krahlin, Major Mark Scaramella, Charlie Engel, John Passyka, Rex Gressett, Flynne Washburne, Bret Bengston, Louis Bedrock, Skip Taube, and more, and dammitall, look at that, they’re all of the oppressive patriarchy. I didn’t notice that when it was happening. How did that happen? Wait, no: Mary Cesario, Alice Chouteau… hmm. Knowing is half the battle; I’ll put out some more bait. Chocolate, women like chocolate, that’s the ticket, I saw it in Star Trek.

Anyhow, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Skiing video you can make now there are camera drones. Also now there are people who can ski way better than anyone ever could in the long droneless period of human history. Multi-axis corkscrew flips sixty to eighty feet downslope, landing /backward/– how do they practice for that? How do you even try it the first time without breaking your neck?https://theawesomer.com/bobby-brown-roots-lead-water/450310/

“Even donkeys and SNAKES and SATAN talk to God. The only people who don’t talk to God are the… the mean people.” Meaning the mean people who make fun of Jim Bakker’s tub-o-apocalypse-soup enterprise. Come on, it’s a legit business, unlike the rapey religious money fraud scam that cost him his marriage to that lovely what’s-her-name and stuck him in prison for seven years. You can admire the guy for rehabilitating himself. And in fact the future /is/ dehydrated potato soup. Get in on the ground floor.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezENqnD_yGg

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Genius experimental-puppet maker guy Barnaby Dixon thought of a new thing to do. It’s perfect. It’s delightful real-time animation. Whole films should be made using this technique. Why can’t somebody like /this/ be president of the United States? Why does it always have to be somebody not like this? (To be fair, Obama was actually a /little/ like this. The guy, not the puppet. Though, maybe that too. I don’t know. I’ll stop now.)https://theawesomer.com/bug-puppet-gets-face/449701/

Congratulations! Also isn’t it cool that the award for Nobel Prize in Medicine is the secondary coil of a little Tesla coil project? With the Winged Victory of Samothrace on top to shoot sparks off? Someone on the committee had better be recognized with a World Whimsy and Eclecticity Award, and let him (or her) design /that/ award himself (or herself, or whatever).http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/tu-youyou.html

Under a ladder, open umbrella indoors, black cat crosses path, broken mirror, half-chignon hairstyle after Labor Day, barefoot on linoleum… what else? The picture doesn’t go up far enough to see if there’s a paint can on the top step. No upside-down crucifix or anything like that. Hmm. I think that’s it. I think that’s all of them.http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/beware-friday-13th.html

“When you look for guidance, direction, mentorship, you always look toward institutions but it’s really yourself that is the final arbiter. And if you keep yourself as the final arbiter, you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion. Now the problem with this is it makes you feel bad to not be infected by cultural illusion because it’s called alienation. But the reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” -Terrence McKenna

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

“Never q-tip drunk. There’s an old Chinese saying I saw in a movie: If you can still clean your ear with a toothpick, you’re not drunk. That’s terrifyingly bad advice. Up to that point I had thought the ancient Chinese were smarter than that. But nobody is smart when they’re drunk. Everybody who is drunk is a big stupid baby with car keys and a gun.”

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes…” A hundred years of hurricane tracks in a couple of minutes. They’re just cute little jagged lines, seen this way. It’s interesting to think that each of those little lines represents a row of bloated cow corpses folded upside-down over a guardrail, or the carport of a gas station spinning like a frisbee over a golf course, or an apparently unharmed, unmoved telephone pole growing /through/ a ladder, between rungs, or a man swimming, pulling his wife and baby and dog riding in a refrigerator for a boat, down the middle of Main Street, or the backs of children and a thin tall man all in a schoolyard, everyone fascinated by the sky over there, just before the man whirls around and screams for the children to GET INTO THE SCHOOL! COME ON! KAITLYN, LEAVE THE GODDAMN BALL! GO GO GO!https://i.redd.it/q0udc4wfhvjz.gif

I’m old enough to remember when people used the slang term /piano/ for this thing. I’ve had half a dozen typewriters. My favorite, the best to use, was a smallish gray-brown government-issue electric model whose keys were all on a hair-trigger and it looked like a toy 1940s Dodge hood and made a pleasant purring/thrumming sound, like it was saying mmm-hm? mmm-hm? mmm-hm? mmm-hm? and also num-num-num-num-num-num-num-num at the same time. Carriage return was like a catapult with your fingers in your ears. They sure don’t make them like that any more.http://machinesoflovinggrace.com/rems.htm

Here’s why real pianos cost so much. This whole mechanism is duplicated and sits behind every one of 88 keys in just one box, and they all have to be made to last a hundred years with people sitting on it, and spilling their drinks into it and using it for an ashtray. Then there’s the iron harp, that has to hold against tons and tons of force, which is why pianos weigh enough to bend spacetime and make marbles roll in their direction. And somebody has to tune it the first time, and then tune it again every time you move it anywhere. Biff Rose had a tiny 66-key apartment piano that he used to play rolling around in the back of Margie Crowningshield’s stepvan. I wish we could get something like that for KNYO. Max the Piano Player has condemned the one we have. “It’s a nice piece of furniture,” he said. “It’s not a piano.” It was, though, back in the Flapper era.https://imgur.com/F67xGD6

Another comparison of cheap and expensive instruments, this time electric guitars. There’s even less difference between the sound of them than basses. Also, remember the one where they compared violins from $50 through $500,000 and you couldn’t really hear the difference?https://laughingsquid.com/cheap-vs-expensive-guitars/

The torture and murder of Julian of Cilicia. I’m informed by the Comtesse DeSpair that he was placed in a bag (check) with scorpions and snakes (check) and then thrown into to sea. I don’t really see any sea in the woodcut, but maybe it’s off to the right, past the, uh, amusement park, it looks like. Too bad he couldn’t do like in the mouse and the lion story and be all, /Be cool, snakes. Just bite the rope off my hands and I’ll get us all home and dry./ Snakes are like flies; they don’t listen. And don’t even get me started about scorpions, yeesh.https://gallery.mailchimp.com/c6b93ffeed2f362e41fe4aa72/images/283125b8-939e-4a88-b70c-2e617ab1a4b0.jpg

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

The end of the world. Again? Ugh. Okay, you kids know the drill: get the briquets and meet me in the bathroom. The good briquets, not the guest briquets. I’ll get the dog. Go. Go.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoNp8dkyYWU

“A wonderful sense of shared obscene solidarity.” “Without such a tiny exchange of friendly obscenities you don’t get real contact between each other. It remains /cold/ respect.” He’s like this all the time. His nose really tickles him. Or rather something tickles his nose.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM

“In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it should be settled for us without our permission. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.” -G.K. Chesterton

A very short film about Laika Studios. They made /Boxtrolls/, /Kubo and the Two Strings/, /ParaNorman/, /Coraline/… (If you see /Boxtrolls/, stay for the short bit after the closing credits.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehGSssAxMQ

The latest in Luke Mazur’s wonderful series of short plays about Jared Kushner, whose job in government, because his own father left him obscenely rich by going to prison for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, and because he’s married to Fat Donny Two-Scoops’ daughter, is to negotiate peace in the entire Middle East, solve America’s entire opioid epidemic, define diplomacy with Mexico (and also with China), reform veterans’ health care (and also reform the entire criminal justice system), and to “re-invent” the U.S. government and make it work like a business. Doctor effing /Manhattan/ couldn’t do it.https://www.theawl.com/2017/09/jared-kushner-starts-a-fire/

I’m not a big fan of pop music videos in the first place, but this is the most entirely nonironically stupid music-with-video I’ve ever seen. It actually makes you nauseous; it’s that stupid. Enjoy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pgyI63QAKI

“For every dildo shop, whorehouse, liquor store or licentious theater that lightning strikes and burns to the ground, weather destroys a thousand churches, and there’s an obvious explanation for this, you’re just not seeing it.”

Besides all that, here are links to a few not necessarily radio-useful but otherwise worthwhile items that I set aside for you while putting the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Everybody’s over the eclipse by now. That was /so/ three weeks ago. But here’s the best view of it, no matter where you drove or what kind of pinhole thing you made out of aluminum foil and cardboard. Our sun is almost 900,000 miles across, so just one of those feathery little wisps at the edge could swallow the whole Earth, tornadoes, volcanoes, kittens and all, like a flaming roaring garbage disposal swallowing a graham cracker crumb.https://laughingsquid.com/moon-crossing-sun-during-2017-total-solar-eclipse/

“Maureen, you’re not helping, looking in the door! Get him, Denny! Did you get him? Nah, he’s still flying. He is making a mockery of you, boy! Oh! Get him, Denny. Fuck it, the dog’s pissing. Oh! Oh!” And so on. Just /try/ not to burst into laughter. (I just read that Jimmy Kimmel was so impressed with this Irish family’s natural comedic aptitude that he brought them on his teevee show. I like Jimmy Kimmel. I like his weird-but-/why/-weird? eyes. Oh, no! Look, Sarah Silverman broke up with him in 2009. Shit. If /they/ couldn’t work it out, what hope is there?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbxEaxUM9SE